My Secret Project: Hyperion

It's not released yet, this is just a sneak peak of something I'm working on in my spare time.

The main thing I wanted was an "inbox" style interface for finding new posts. I have no issue with the existing interfaces, but I wanted to step away from that using a fresh new approach.

I was partially inspired by Google Reader. It had that "inbox" feel that I enjoyed. But one of the problems with Google Reader was that feeds could become overwhelming.

The approach I'm using is to manage tags/community feeds, with an emphasis on chronological sort.

Goals

1. 100 % manual voting mana utilization: Help curators find at least 10 posts per day so they can use up their voting power, manually.
2. Ignore tags option: To achieve this fully manual curation, allow curators to ignore certain tags/communities, if they wish.
3. Favorite tags option: Allow curators to set certain tags as their favorite tags/communities.
4. No historic content: Only index content that is within the voting window.
5. No comments: Only index root posts (not replies).
6. Mark as read: Allow curators to mark posts as read so that they can find new content at their own pace.
7. Related tags: Find tags that are related to other tags, grouped by post frequency.
8. Keyboard hotkeys: Navigate using the keyboard.

Future Features

1. Direct Voting: Instead of browsing to the post just to vote, why not vote directly from the interface (via Hive Keychain, of course).
2. Poisoned pills: An option to automatically ignore authors if they post to certain tags/communities. Beyond just ignoring posts on these tags, it will also ignore the entire blog of authors who may occasionally post to these tags, until they stop using those tags.
3. Community Moderation: Once a curator has a handle on a tag/community, I'll offer tools to expand directly on this as well. This will allow moderators to enforce their personal ignore rules on a community, if they wish to apply them.

Tag Cloud

There are probably better looking word clouds out there, but unlike those, this one is functional. When you drill into a particular tag, you can get a list of related tags, which is shown as a cloud, with bigger words representing tags with more posts:

In the above example, first I did a search on the tag comics then pulled up the related tags dialog. From here, I can see what tags are used along with comics at a glance.

If I click on one, space for example, I'll see posts that have both comics along with space together:

This is really nice because there's only one, and it's hyper focused on exactly what I was looking for.

I still have some performance/scalability issues to work out. Not really sure what the release schedule will look like.